Not a ton of van progress today, but we got some work done to get back on track.
The morning was spent dealing with snow from yesterday’s storm. This was our Christmas present to Dad.
To be clear, we did not buy him a new snowblower. Our gift to him was to convince him he really needed a new snowblower, and boy did he. His old machine was about 20 years old, it was single-stage, the chute did not even turn any more, and it only ran on half-choke. I am seriously impressed he managed to keep using it because I was fed up with it after only a few inches of snow!
He really started to get the hang of it.
He does, however, need to learn a little about how far it shoots snow. Some lady came up his driveway to tell him he was shooting snow on the road below and he nearly hit a car with a rock. Then I looked at the front of the house. Good thing there were no rocks on the driveway!
When we finally got focused on the van, I spent a while installing some final bolts on the solar system while Sara did a pretty massive garage clean-up so we could keep working. With the bolts installed I don’t think there is any more reason to get up on the roof. Sara also kept putting in more plus-nuts while I made an obligatory Ace run, then we put in our first wall. It actually took quite a while because we had to measure and cut multiple times (e.g. we kind of forgot the van wire harness that needed to be accommodated), then we had to do our trick with the hanger bolts to figure out where all the holes will go. It did work well, though, so we have our first wall temporarily in place. We still need to stain/poly it and run a couple more wires, but we are excited to have some visible progress.
We had hoped to get the wall in without removing the bed, but that wasn’t to be. As long as I had a couple bed posts out I modified them so they can be removed a little easier in the future. Our original method required either access to the back side of the floor bracket or to remove the whole bracket. Instead, I forced some stainless steel t-nuts in the back so we can now drive a bolt right through the entire post. This will allow us to remove the post from the bracket with only a wrench on the front.
A final picture to amuse those of you in New England used to salted roads and prompt plowing. Driving down the main street in La Grande today reminded me that not all snow-removal budgets are the same! I have no idea why the city had not even bothered to plow downtown for over 24 hours after the storm because I did see a few roads plowed in places, but downtown it was still up to 6″ of snow and now thick packed ice. That’s not going to be clean any time soon!
